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You 2.0: The Value Of 'Deep Work' In An Age Of Distraction

Every time you give in to your phone or computer that's buzzing with notifications, you pay a price: little by little, you lose your ability to focus.

Getty Images/Caiaimage, Tom Merton

Many of us react to the buzzes and beeps that come from our phones with the urgency of a parent responding to a baby’s cry. We can’t help but pick up our phone and look at the latest notification. We know this probably isn’t the healthiest nor the sanest response to a vibrating hunk of a metal, so we tell ourselves we should be less distracted. We shouldn’t be so gripped by social media or the churn of work email.

“We treat it, I think, in this more general sense of, ‘eh, I probably should be less distracted.’ But I think it’s more urgent than people realize,” he says.

By letting email and other messages guide our workday, Cal says we’re weakening our ability to do the most challenging kinds of work—what he calls “deep work.” Deep work requires sustained attention, whether the task is writing marketing copy or solving a tricky engineering problem.

We’re also denying ourselves the satisfaction that often comes from committing our full attention to a task. Replying to a string of emails rarely arouses this same feeling.

This week on Hidden Brain, we look at how to cultivate deep attention and what we gain when we immerse ourselves in meaningful work.

This episode is part of a series of episodes called You 2.0.

The Hidden Brain Podcast is hosted by Shankar Vedantam and produced by Maggie Penman, Jennifer Schmidt, Renee Klahr, Rhaina Cohen, Parth Shah, and Lucy Perkins. Our supervising producer is Tara Boyle. You can also follow us on Twitter @hiddenbrain, and listen for Hidden Brain stories each week on your local public radio station.